Over the last two years, we have been treated to a great deal of nostalgia for the golden age of the 1990s, when the Pericles of the Ozarks was in power and all was right with the world. This was particularly true in the case of the team put together by President Obama, who brought back Larry Summers (who may have just been fired), listened to Bob Rubin (though he may be next), appointed Rahm Emanuel (until he's mayor of Chicago), and anointed Hillary Clinton (which oddly seems like it really shouldn't count).

Over the last two weeks — Larry's trip back to Cambridge aside — we have been treated to a great deal of nostalgia for the other, darker side of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton sat atop a criminal enterprise that killed Vince Foster, ran drugs through the Mena airport, masterminded clever real-estate swindles that cost him a fortune, and buried himself in various lubricious and steamy cauldrons of which Christine O'Donnell does not approve, and likely didn't even in her witchy days, when the cauldrons were presumably less metaphorical. Actually, much of this has to do with the emergence of O'Donnell, who made her first facsimile of a grown-up career out of peddling this swill back when demand was high, and now sees the evidence of her past political grifting popping up all over the Intertoobz.

Look around. Newt Gingrich is back, and nuttier than ever, having given up his half-daffy futurism in favor of rank nativism and religious paranoia. And we have Newsweek already explaining how an unreconstructed bagman like John Boehner could be a fine speaker of the House because he could work with a Democratic president to craft "bipartisan" solutions, the way that Bill Clinton and Gingrich did, as though the capital wasn't a madhouse then, and as though those solutions, which included tougher-than-it-had-to-be welfare reform that Clinton signed because Dick Morris told him it was good politics, are anything to be proud of. And the congressional Republicans are already giddy about a limitless vista of investigations and another government shutdown, because people will come from miles around to applaud the freak show.

It's time to give the 1990s a rest, I think. It was not a good time for our politics. Bill Clinton drove people utterly insane, and they acted on that insanity, vigorously and in full public view. The Republican party gave itself wholeheartedly to freaks and Arkansas con-men, and produced a generation of politicians who would believe anything because they could talk themselves into anything, and who were urged on to further flights of fancy by the rise of crazoid designer media. They not only detached themselves from the reality of governing. They detached themselves from the reality of what they themselves were doing: When was the last time any Republican bragged about the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which, at the time, occasioned gleaming white marble oratory about the Rule of Law, and quotations from both Thomas More and, more often, from the play that Robert Bolt wrote about him? It was an exercise in Pissing Off Liberals, and that's all that mattered, and it's altogether disappeared from the institutional memory of the party that once claimed it would save the Republic from executive overreach and blowjobs.

The line from then until now is clear and bright, and it belies all the nonsense about how Tea Party politics is sui generis for the age of Obama. It also belies the lunatic notion that our "divisive" politics are a result of pressure from both extremes against the middle. Only the Republicans empowered their extremes. Dr. Jekyll was Henry Hyde. Michelle Bachmann is a mere debutante in those politics. Even in the wildest days of the 1960s and 1970s, the Democrats never ran Abbie Hoffman for Congress. For all the exotic fauna now traipsing around the conservative landscape, the 1990s were the pre-Cambrian explosion.

On the other side, it was the Clinton years that produced a Democratic party content with half-measures and wishful thinking, attaching itself to trade policies that substituted the messianic buzzwords of globalism for, you know, actual jobs, abolishing the Glass-Steagall Act to great acclaim and even greater financial fraud, and generally refashioning itself as a home for people who really, really Liked Ike. (Recently, Clinton got testy because Rachel Maddow referred to him as a "good Republican president." This, of course, was bullshit from the master, since Clinton once famously commented to his own economic team that "We're all Eisenhower Republicans now.") This was fine when the economy was humming along, and we were not bogged down in two wars, and the financial system hadn't nearly dissolved into a puddle. Now, it's been so long since the Democratic party ran on a genuinely progressive platform that the president and his people can't seem to put together a coherent campaign based on what they relentlessly assure us has been the most triumphant progressive presidency since LBJ. They don't know how to run like that anymore, especially not the retreads from the Class of '92. Ah, as Mr. Dooley once put it, "Thim was the days."